NAME

jetring - maintenance of gpg keyrings using changesets

OVERVIEW

jetring is a collection of tools that allow for gpg keyrings to be
maintained using changesets. It was developed with the Debian keyring
in mind, and aims to solve the problem that a gpg keyring is a binary
blob that's hard for multiple people to collaboratively edit.
With jetring, changesets can be submitted, reviewed to see exactly what
they will do, applied, and used to build a keyring. The origin of every
change made to the keyring is available for auditing, and gpg
signatures can be used to further secure things.

OPERATION

A jetring directory is used as the "source" that a keyring is built
from. To convert an existing gpg keyring to such a directory, use the
jetring-explode(1) command.
Each change to the gpg keyring is stored in a separate changeset file
in the directory. Changesets can reflect any set of changes to the
keyring. Changesets can also include arbitrary metadata. The jetring-gen(1) command can be used to compare two keyrings and generate a
changeset from one to the other.
Changesets are never removed or modified, only new ones added, using
the jetring-accept(1) command.
There's an ordering of the changesets. This ordering is stored in an
index file. The index file is only appended to, to add new changesets.
Changesets can be fully examined to see what change they make before
applying them. The jetring-review(1) and jetring-diff(1) commands can
be used for such review.
To create a new keyring, or incrementally update an existing keyring,
changesets are applied in order using the jetring-build(1) command.

GPGSIGNATURES

The index file can optionally be gpg signed (the signature will be
stored in index.gpg); if JETRING_SIGN is set to point to a gpg keyring,
then jetring commands that operate on the jetring directory will always
check that the index file is signed with one of the keys from that
keyring. Commands that modify the index file will update its signature.

CHANGESETFORMAT

A changeset file consists of one or more stanzas, separated by blank
lines. The stanzas are in RFC-822-like format. Each stanza must have
an action field, which specifies which action to take on the keyring,
and a data field, typically a multi-line field, which contains the data
to feed to the action. Supported actions are:
import The data field should be an ascii-armored gpg key block, that is
fed into gpg --import.
edit-keykeyid
gpg --edit-key is run on the specified key id. The data field is
a script, each line in it is passed in to gpg, the same as if
gpg were being driven interactively. This can be used to make
arbitrary changes to the key.
delete-keykeyid
The given key is deleted. The data is fed into gpg --delete-key,
and should be "y", since gpg expects that confirmation to
deleting a key.
Other fields can be added as desired to hold metadata about the change.
Typical additional fields include date, changed-by, and comment.
Changesets can be optionally have attached signatures, although such
data is not automatically validated and is mostly useful to record who
submitted or signed off on a given changeset.